Announcement

After 5 years serving the vintage Apple enthusiast community, ThinkClassic has been marked for closure and is now in caretaker mode. Please see this thread for further information. Please direct any questions, comments and enquiries about the website, management and ownership to this thread.

ThinkClassic native app

Rather than continuing to hijack the thread in the Front Bar, this thread is where I'll post updates to the screen scraping native app.

As background, this is a System 7 app to view and post to thinkclassic.org.The current requirements are: System 7.0.1 or later, and MacTCP or OpenTransport.

Changes in 0.2:- I implemented some basic unescaping of the forum & topic names, and post text, consisting mainly of understanding "&" and "'", which seem to be the most commonly used escaped characters so far.- Post text is also de-HTML'd, which is a little easier to read. - It'll also try to login on launch, rather than needing to explicitly login from the File->Login menu option.- I'm scraping the username of the poster and including that, so you at least know whose post you're reading.- It should handle posts with multiple pages better.

Re: ThinkClassic native app

It is possible, as I like to say with software anything is possible, given enough time. But that's the real trick, there's never enough time.Since this isn't really parsing the html, just kind of doing some substring matching, it is prone to breaking anytime there's changes to the site. Different sites have different capabilities and challenges though. The larger sites have web programming interfaces (like REST, XML RPC, whatever the new hawtness is), which make things a bit easier. On the other hand, most places require SSL, which makes things a bit harder. I tend to shy away from doing anything where I'd have to spend much time on the authentication system (like most of the major social networking sites), since I do authentication systems for my day job, and it becomes a little to much like 'work'. This is all about screwing around, having fun, and hopefully learning something in the process.

This is an idea I've been tossing around for a while. I might have mentioned doing one for 68kmla at some time in the past, and certainly considered it. With mac68k.info there wasn't much point since it has a fully functional NNTP interface. TC was just the right place, right setup, at the right time.

Re: ThinkClassic native app

Impressive! Will have to try it myself some time.

We do have some site changes in the pipeline, but I'm fairly confident that the HTML structure will remain the same. There's a good chance that this app won't require any changes to make it work after the update, but at the very most it'll be one or two changed paths. Future releases of FluxBB may change the HTML structure, but we should know if that's to be the case ahead of schedule.

Our current version (1.5.6) will likely be updated to 1.5.7 when it's released, unless they choose to fork it to the 1.6.x branch. Even if that's the case, the HTML should remain fairly consistent between releases. The only exception I can see is when they move from the 1.x branch to the 2.x branch since that's a complete rewrite, but I don't think that will happen for some time.

Re: ThinkClassic native app

Yeah, I'm using a scsi ethernet adapter. I just tried putting a modem from my pb180 into the pb100, to use the line simulator/rpi setup I used for the datarover, but something ain't right, so ethernet it is for the moment.

I was mainly trying to see what I'd have to do to make it work on System 6, but it worked just fine without any changes.

Re: ThinkClassic native app

I updated CodeWarrior on the Q800 to Pro 2 and it needs a couple tweaks to compile. In particular, Gestalt.Equ.h should now be Gestalt.h and the enums for FindControl() (like inUpButton, etc.), need to be the later k* equivalents. And of course, the new names for the MSL and ANSI libraries.

I was going to update it to Pro 5 since I have it also but I forgot the IDE doesn't run on 68K.

Re: ThinkClassic native app

I've updated the native app so it continues working.The changes are basically to just add the User-Agent string so it can be whitelisted from the sslification efforts, and some minor tweaks to keep working with site layout. thinkclassic0.3.cpt.hqx